Perfectly synced gears rotate at 4500 RPM and mesh without slowing

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In the video below we see three gears from Mitsubishi Electric spinning at extremely high speeds, in the range of 4500 RPM to be exact. Those gears are placed on a rail system which allows them to slide into and out of sync while moving. So, just to be entirely clear, Mitsubishi’s gears are so precise that, while rotating, they can go into and out of mesh with interrupting their perfect flow… or exploding into a mess of metal shards. This sort of precision requires engineering down to the micron level.

The explanation notes that the system uses three separate motors, has a maximum speed of 6000 RPM, and has a clever regenerative system that allows the braking of one gear to harness energy for the others. The video display how the gears can perfectly move side-to-side, spin, and rotate all with micron-level precision.

What’s not clear in the video is if one gear is doing what gears are designed to do: power the other gears down the line. At all times the gears are rotating in unison, but at no point in the demo does a moving gear come in contact with a stopped gear. Given the speeds that would probably have been catastrophic, but the point of using a gear system would not be to have them spin in sync independently of one another, it’s to have a dependent movement system. This would require gear-on-gear contact which isn’t as precise as what we’re seeing here and possibly won’t work well at such high speeds. If necessary it could work by the motors getting two unsynced gears up to a known speed, syncing them, and then powering one down, allowing the other gear to maintain the movement.

Update: Some commenters rightly pointed out that the video is meant to display the accuracy of the servo motors, which is hugely apparent in this video. The gears were, in this case, just used to display that accuracy as they have a relatively tight tolerance between the teeth. Thus my speculation about dependent drive between the gears (in the paragraph above) was off topic as these are each servo-driven so a such a system would be necessary. That being noted, the use of gears in certainly lends itself to such a thought and this could come in handy if some sort of force amplification was necessary (or of motion, but that’s unlikely at 6000 RPM).

The presented noted that a gear system like this has uses in a number of industries including automotives, printing, and food production, though it’s not entirely clear what the practical application of a high-speed non-dependent gear system would be. (Please leave a comment if you have any ideas.)